I’m a freelance journalist specialising in education. My career so far has taken in regional and national newspapers and magazines; now I write for publications including Forbes, The Daily Telegraph and the Guardian. A lot has changed since I started covering education as a wide-eyed junior reporter in the early 1990s, not least the role of technology in the classroom, but as long as perfection remains just out of reach there will be plenty to discuss. I’ve been hooked on news since setting up a school magazine at 15, but these days I stick to reporting and let someone else sell the adverts, set the crossword and staple the pages together.

How Teach For America Is Sparking A Revolution

In the quarter century since the idea first saw the light of day, Teach For America has never been far from controversy. But for all its impact in the U.S., it is outside its homeland where it is making the biggest waves, sparking nothing less than a revolution in teacher training.

It took a while for the concept to spread across the Atlantic. It was not until 2002 – 12 years after TFA launched – that Brett Wigdortz, a former McKinsey consultant, launched Teach First in the U.K.

The principle was the same: attract high-flying graduates to teach in some of the most disadvantaged schools in the country. Teach First also provided a school-led alternative to traditional university-based training programs.

A dozen years on, Teach First’s impact has been impressive. Last year, it was the U.K.’s largest single graduate recruiter, taking on around 1,200 graduates. This year it will go further, hiring 1,550, and next year expects to reach 2,000.

Its influence goes much deeper than numbers. It has also made teaching an enticing option for people who would never have previously considered it.

“Almost nobody was applying to be a teacher from Oxbridge 10 years ago, and now 7-8% are applying for Teach First,” says Sam Freedman, the organisation’s director of research, impact and evaluation. “At Russell Group universities [a group of leading, research-intensive universities], teaching has changed from something that few people did to a very credible profession.”

In part, this is because no-one previously recruited into teaching so intensively from these universities. But many graduates are also attracted by Teach First’s ‘offer’: spend two years doing something worthwhile to put on your CV before going into your chosen career.

Still, these numbers are small compared with overall entry onto teacher training, and Teach First may be nearing capacity. Freedman says the high bar that Teach First sets for entry means there is little room for further growth beyond next year’s 2,000 target and it is likely to remain a niche way into the profession.

If the story ended there it would be one of a high-profile but peripheral member of the team, capable of punching above its weight but essentially a fringe player.

But its impact goes much wider than those who enrol on Teach First itself, or who now consider teaching as a career. Two years ago the U.K. government created its own school-led path into teaching that is threatening to overturn the domination of university-based training.

This new program, School Direct, was inspired by Teach First, and Freedman should know: before working for Teach First he was the advisor to Education Secretary Michael Gove whose report laid the ground for this approach.

“We tried to work out how we could replicate some aspects of it [Teach First] on a large scale,” Freedman says. “It was about school-focused training with universities providing support, rather than it being something you did at university, and that slowly morphed into School Direct.”

Last year School Direct took up a quarter of teacher training places and this year will account for almost 40%. By contrast, university-based schemes have seen their allocation fall from 69% last year to 56% this year. As a result, several universities have withdrawn from teacher training altogether.

Chloe Shaw, one of the Tough Young Teachers featured in a BBC documentary

Although not all of School Direct’s places were taken up last year, the government’s faith in the program appears undimmed and a situation where more than half of new teachers are trained in schools – a direct consequence of Teach First – is easy to envisage. Whether this is a good thing is another question, but it undoubtedly represents a major shift in the way teachers are trained.

Teach First is not universally popular. Long-standing objections are that Teach First teachers only sign up for two years and have little preparation before they enter the classroom, to which Teach First counters that its retention rates are only slightly lower than for other routes into teaching and its recruits get similar lecture time on their six-week intensive course as trainees get on year-long university schemes.

It has also been criticised for championing a mission – that a child’s educational success should not be limited by their background – that is far from exclusive to Teach First recruits.

More wounding objections are that it practises a sink-or-swim approach, with support for new teachers varying wildly between schools, and that it is an expensive path into teaching. According to evidence submitted to the House of Commons, it costs 40% more to train a Teach First teacher than through the university-based schemes.

Despite this, Teach First has managed to avoid attracting the levels of opprobrium heaped on Teach For America. In part, Freedman argues, this is because Teach First has worked with universities, rather than setting itself up as an alternative. It has also not aligned itself so strongly with reform movements, unlike its U.S. counterpart, many of whose alumni have gone on to run charter schools.

It can also point to research carried out at the Institute of Education showing that the presence of a Teach First teacher in a department can make a significant difference to exam results. Possibly even greater impact has been achieved with the BBC documentary Tough Young Teachers, broadcast earlier this year, which followed half a dozen Teach First recruits for a year and gave the scheme a huge public relations boost.

Despite this newfound popularity, there will be those who continue to argue that it is neither an effective nor a cost-efficient way of training teachers. But it is hard to dispute that it has brought about a transformation in teacher training. And for all the arguments over the impact in the classroom or a supposed new breed of recruits, that may be Teach For America’s ultimate legacy.

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Teach for America has earned every dollop of the opprobrium it has received. It is another arrow in the quiver of education privatizers who con upper-class graduates into union-busting for a year or two before they join a Wall Street firm. I am delighted that more and more American school districts are refusing to have anything to do with this scam.

It’s interesting how differently the two schemes are perceived in their respective constituencies. Although Teach First has been on the receiving end of a lot of hostility – particularly in its early days – and is still viewed with suspicion by some, it has attracted nothing like the level of opposition aimed at Teach For America. Some of this must be down to Teach First learning from TFA’s mistakes in not antagonising the establishment, but perhaps there are also cultural differences that affect the type of people who go into each program. After all, for most people they are the face of the scheme, and how they approach it, whether as an opportunity to put something back or purely to have something on their CV, will make a huge difference as to how the scheme is viewed.